With springtime temperatures firmly established for most of the U.S. and only a few upper Northeast locations outside parts of Western Canada expected to get as low as freezing Tuesday, the cash market had to depend on the previous Friday’s 16.1-cent advance by May futures and the restoration of industrial demand after its usual weekend timeout in realizing mostly double-digit gains at a large majority of points Monday.

A few generally small losses of up to nearly a dime in the Rockies constituted the exceptions to increases ranging from 2-3 cents to slightly more than 30 cents higher numbers elsewhere. Most of the largest upticks were concentrated in the Northeast.

For a while Monday morning it looked as if the physical market might continue to have prior-day screen support with the May contract solidly in positive territory. It didn’t last, however, and prompt-month futures ended the day with a decline of 6.1 cents, although they managed to stay an eyelash above the key support level of $4 (see related story).

Despite little more than chilly Tuesday forecasts for the Northeast, Texas Eastern M-3 volumes traded on the IntercontinentalExchange platform soared from 272,500 MMBtu in Friday deals for the weekend to 441,800 MMBtu Monday. M-3 quotes rose nearly a quarter Monday after retreating by 7 cents Friday.

Forecasts of lows around freezing in the northern end of New York and upper New England gave that region the extra support to achieve Monday’s strongest gains. Otherwise the Midwest outlook generally was for cool conditions, and Southern peak temperatures in the 70s could hardly be expected to provide a great deal of cooling load.

Most of the western U.S. is due to stay at least a little above freezing Tuesday, but snow is not out of the picture yet as The Weather Channel said six to 12 inches of the frozen precipitation could fall Tuesday in higher elevations of the Sierra Nevada range.

Noting a Hold Burn to Scheduled Quantities notice by Southwest Gas (see Transportation Notes), Kern River said it was one of the upstream pipelines that was experiencing high linepack and needed some drafting aid from the Las Vegas-based LDC to relieve the pressure.

It still seems like a roller-coaster ride for prices, said a Texas marketer who expected the modest futures reversal to take the cash market a little bit lower Tuesday. He was pretty sure that there was some air conditioning load for gas in the South, especially with quite a bit of nuclear downtime for maintenance; “it’s [cooling demand] just not very much” right now.

Pipeline flows are generally smooth at this time, the marketer added, but he confessed to being a bit puzzled by Nicor’s continuing restrictions on Chicago citygate deliveries. He didn’t think the constraints had much to do with weather, saying Chicago-area temperatures are currently fairly moderate; however, he suspected that it was more of a case of tight storage injection capacity for the utility.

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